1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to a system and method for integrating applications based upon a user's actions. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system and method of integrating portlets so that source portlets are able to automatically provide data to target portlets.
2. Description of the Related Art
The portal market is one of the fastest growing markets of computer software. A portal in the present invention may be defined as an application which provides a secure, single point of interaction with diverse information, business processes, and people, personalized to a user's needs and responsibilities. A portal, or “Web portal,” is a Web site or service that offers a broad array of resources and services, such as e-mail, forums, search engines, and on-line shopping malls. Portals are typically accessed by a user on the Internet using a software application, such as a Web browser. A Web browser, or “browser,” is a software application used to locate and display Web pages. The two most popular browsers are Netscape Navigator™ and Microsoft Internet Explorer™. Both of these are graphical browsers, which means that they can display graphics as well as text. In addition, most modern browsers can present multimedia information, including sound and video, though they often require plug-ins in order to handle some formats.
The demand for portals drives rapid development of new technologies by different portal vendors in order to place their products in advantageous market positions. Not surprisingly, portals have evolved to their current state from a more primitive beginning. Originally, portals were mainly used as access points to different information sources with content being chosen by the portal operator. Next, portal customization provided users with the ability to choose the content that was displayed on the user's view of the portal using a Web browser. In this phase, the user was able to select information according to the user's interests and retrieve information related to his or her interests more expeditiously. Customized information delivery led to the introduction of business, or corporate, portals. Business portals were introduced to provide intra-business data within an organization.
The ongoing evolution of portals also left its footprint in the architecture of portal products. At first, portal-like products were delivered as pre-packaged applications that could be installed out of the box and included standard applications, which provided the portal functionality. As new applications were needed, vendors extended their products in order to satisfy requirements of the new applications. Due to the use of proprietary designs, portal vendors exclusively added functionality to their portals, tying the success of a portal to the applications that the portal included. This led to the decomposition of monolithic structures and the creation of portal frameworks.
Portal products offered today employ architectures whereby the portal itself only implements standard functionality, such as security, authorization, authentication, aggregation, caching, user management, enrollment, rendering, and the like. The portal provides the infrastructure to integrate other application components. This architecture includes APIs for integrating applications so that applications from different vendors can be used so long as they match the portal product's API. In the portal environment, these applications are commonly called “portlets.”
Portlets are components that can be added to portals and are designed to run inside a portal's portlet container. Portlets may provide different functions ranging from simple rendering of static or dynamic content to application functions such as e-mail, electronic calendaring, and the like. Portlets are invoked indirectly via the portal infrastructure and produce content that is suited for aggregation in larger pages.
While portlets allow separation of application components from each other and from the underlying portal, a challenge of using portlets is the difficulty in transmitting data that appears on one portlet to another portlet. For example, if one portlet displays orders for an organization and another portlet displays details for orders, vendors would have to “couple” the portlets to allow the user to send data from one portlet to another. In a business system, many portlets may be driven from the same pieces of information, such as order numbers, account numbers, and customer numbers. Closely coupling portlets to one another increases development requirements and maintenance of each portlet. In addition, coupling portlets may require activation of each of the coupled portlets even though the user only wants to view a subset of the coupled portlets.
What is needed, therefore, is a system and method for integrating portlets so that data items existing on “source” portlets can be used to populate data and drive actions on other “target” portlets. In addition, a set of “actions” the user can take should be determined and made available based upon the currently activated target portlets, without having to couple individual portlets to one another.